Security News

After a year off due to a certain virus, the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences returned to Las Vegas last week, just in time for the US government's attempts to foster more collaboration across the infosec industry. The newly appointed Security Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency Jen Easterly took to the virtual Black Hat stage last week and announced the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, which she claimed would be a true public/private partnership to try to lock down security incidents by sharing data and skills.

Personal information for students in the Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas, has reportedly turned up on an underground forum, following a ransomware attack that researchers say was carried out by the Maze gang. In early September, the Associated Press reported that the district was crippled during its first week of school thanks to a ransomware attack, potentially exposing personal information of employees, including names and Social Security numbers.

The city of Las Vegas and NTT Corporation announced the Accelerate Smart project has expanded to include two new locations - the city's Community Healing Garden and a portion of Las Vegas Boulevard at South Main Street and East St. Louis Avenue. As part of the partnership, NTT and the city plan to further expand the smart cities project to Bob Baskin Park, Rotary Park, Stupak Park and Ethel Pearson Park this summer before adding six additional parks by the end of 2020.

First, the bad: over the holiday break, crooks who are so morally bankrupt that they target the organizations that serve children pounced on schools in the US city of Pittsburg, California. On Monday, the superintendent of Pittsburg Unified School District, Janet Schulze, put up a message about the ransomware attack on the district's Facebook page.

Las Vegas officials said Tuesday that that a cyber attack breached the city's computer systems, but it wasn't immediately clear if any sensitive data was compromised. City officials were alerted to the breach around 4:30 a.m., city spokesman David Riggleman told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Black Hat, DEF CON and Bsides come to Nevada About a quarter of a century ago, a handful of hackers decided to have a party in a cheap hotel, and had a whale of a time.…

Long-lived critical flaws in widely deployed bedrock internet infrastructure are not rare. Analysts have estimated that, on average, such flaws go unremediated for 10 months before being...

In two unrelated breaches, the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Las Vegas and Noodle and Company confirm hacks.